This site is a sort of museum in cyberspace full of odds and ends about life in Budleigh Salterton.
It celebrates among other things the connection between our corner of East Devon - birthplace of both Sir Walter Raleigh and Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Massachusetts - and the United States of America.
The site was inspired by the friendship link established in 2001 with the Cape Cod community of Brewster.

Sunday, 20 November 2011

Above: Stuart Hibberd's memoirs, published in 1950 as This - is London...Stuart Hibberd was one of the best known voices on radio in the early days of the BBC. He joined the Corporation in 1924 and was its chief announcer until his retirement in 1951. He settled in Budleigh Salterton, living in Westfield Road. Stuart Hibberd was born on 5 September 1893 in Broadstone, East Dorset, and educated at Weymouth College from where he won a choral scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was always proud of his West Country roots and remained as Vice President of the Society of Dorset Men until the end of his life.On the outbreak of war in 1914 he joined the Dorset Regiment, serving with distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and also with the army in India, where he gained the rank of Captain.In 1923, he married Alice Chichester, a cousin of the future round-the-world sailor Sir Francis Chichester (1901-72). From a military family, she was the daughter of Lt Col Gerard Chichester, who had gained the rank of Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel in the service of the 4th Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment. An uncle was Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Chichester, 9th baronet.The following year he joined the BBC at its headquarters at 2 Savoy Hill next to London's Savoy Hotel, having seen a newspaper advertisement for an announcer. His impeccable enunciation and received pronunciation were clear factors in his favour. The Corporation was just two years old and had recently moved from its previous base at Marconi House at the junction of the Strand and Aldwych. It was at a time when broadcasting was in its infancy, buoyed up with enthusiasm for a new art. Stuart Hibberd recalled the mood in his memoirs: "The three things that impressed me most, as a newcomer, were the general atmosphere of friendliness, the way I was at once made to feel at home - one of a family as it were - and the all pervading pioneering spirit, which seemed to proclaim from the house-tops, 'Here's a wonderful worthwhile job. Nothing matters more than broadcasting, unless it is still better and more extensive broadcasting.'"He became one of the BBC's first professional announcers: reading the news, as well as presenting talks and concerts and talks. Along with other broadcasting pioneers he was responsible for laying down ground rules to develop the special technique of preparing scripts written for the ear rather than for the eye. Shorter, less complicated sentences and the use of colloquial English became prerequisites.Other rules were introduced which have been long since abandoned. From 1926 until September 1939, dinner-jackets were prescribed as standard for radio announcers when on duty in the evenings even though the audience could not see them. Stuart Hibberd recalled in his memoirs how he accepted such rulings. "Personally, I have always thought it only right and proper that announcers should wear evening dress on duty. After all, announcing is a serious, if new, profession, and the wearing of evening dress is an act of courtesy to the artists, many of whom will almost certainly be similarly dressed if they are taking part in a programme from 8 p.m. onwards." He did admit: "It is not ideal kit in which to read the News... and I remember that more than once the engineers said that my shirt-front creaked during the reading of the bulletin."Above: Stuart Hibberd's fame as a radio announcer secured him a place in the gallery of celebrities published on cigarette cards by W.D. & H.O. WillsHe became the BBC’s Chief Announcer, a post that he held for 25 years. During that time his voice became familiar to millions as he announced events of national importance. He was famous for the pause which marked the opening words of his news bulletins: "This - is London." The ten-day General Strike of 1926 was one of the first of such critical events that confronted broadcasters, not least because the public relied solely on the BBC for news of the events, newspaper production having stopped. On Government orders the Corporation's Savoy Hill headquarters was placed under police guard to ensure that broadcasting continued. In 1932 the BBC moved to Broadcasting House in London's Portland Place. It was Stuart Hibberd who read the first news bulletin to be transmitted from the building. Three years later he was appointed MBE for his services to radio.One of his most memorable bulletins was when he announced the impending death of King George V on 20 January 1936 with the words "The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close."The events of World War Two were to make the voices of wartime broadcasters like Alvar Liddell, Frank Phillips and John Snagge even more familiar. This was especially so as the peacetime practice of guarding newsreaders' anonymity had suddenly been abandoned. The BBC Handbook of 1941 stated: "The reason for this is not a hankering after self-advertisment - although at first some listeners unfairly took it to be so; in wartime listeners must be able to recognise instantly the authentic voice of British broadcasting and then, in any possible emergency, they will be on their guard against some lying imitation by the voice of the enemy." Another change came about when in 1940 the BBC transferred to Bristol but this was a temporary measure and the Corporation staff returned to London in July 1942. Stuart Hibberd's bulletin of 1 May 1945 announcing Hitler's death was a much remembered moment of this period. From 1949 he presented The Silver Lining, a Thursday afternoon programme aimed at disabled and housebound people. He also produced talking books for the National Institute for the Blind. After his retirement as chief announcer in 1951 he continued to present The Silver Lining until the programme ended its run in 1964.Stuart Hibberd's retirement from radio was marked by his closedown "Good night everybody... goodnight." The characteristic pause, which also marked the start of his bulletins, was designed to give listeners the chance to say "Good night" in reply. He and his wife Alice moved to Westfield House in Budleigh Salterton where he continued to be well known, popular and respected. In 1970 he was elected President of the Devonshire Association. "People raised their hats to him as he passed in the street when I went to see him in Devon in the 1970s," recalled the broadcaster and journalist Roger George Clark. Alice died in 1977. They had no children.

Robert George Collier Proctor, bibliographer, was born in Budleigh Salterton. He is chiefly remembered for Proctor order, the method of organising incunabula - books printed before 1500 - first by country, then by town, and then by printer and edition. It was this method, used in his Index to the British Museum and Bodleian collections which earned for him the title of 'the great bibliographer.' In his short life he managed to revolutionise the study of 15th century printing.

He was born on 13 May 1868, the only child of Robert Proctor and Anne Tate. A Robert Proctor is recorded as living at 2 Lawn Villas in Morris and Co.'s Commercial Directory and Gazetteer of 1870. Although his father had poor health the family had private means and the young Robert Proctor grew up in a bookish environment. His father, educated at Eton and Charterhouse, had "imbibed a strong love of the classics" according to his British Museum colleague and biographer Alfred Pollard, and it seems that within the family "a book rather than a toy was always chosen when a present was offered."

His grandfather, also called Robert (1798-1875) had written a Narrative of a Journey across the Cordillera of the Andes, and of a Residence in Lima and other parts of Peru in the years 1823 and 1824, published in 1825. The author, while described in a review as providing "minute and interesting sketches, without affecting to color them by any beauty of language" was praised for the "clearness, simplicity and animation" which he brought to the work. The family had other interesting connections, the grandfather having married a sister of the Shakespearean scholar John Payne Collier (1789-1883) who in 1860 was exposed as a literary forger. An uncle by marriage was George Edmund Street (1824-81), an architect who designed the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Robert George Proctor was educated at Daymond's, a preparatory school in Reading before going to Marlborough College, pictured above, at the age of 10. He stayed there for less than a year, partly owing to trouble with his eyes.

Above: The former Bath College. The building is now a hotel

Following his father's death in 1880, Mrs Proctor and her son moved from Budleigh in 1881 to settle at Bath. Here Proctor joined Bath College, a small public boys' school founded in 1879 by the Reverend Thomas William Dunn (1837-1930) who had previously been second master at Boston Grammar School and assistant master at Clifton College, Bristol. He had also been a Fellow and Dean of Peterhouse College, Cambridge in the mid-1860s.

The above photo is of William Dunn as an assistant master at Clifton College, soon after leaving Boston Grammar School.

The new headmaster was obviously someone to whom Proctor owed a great debt. Long after his days at Bath College he kept in touch with 'The Old Man' as he refers to him in his diary, calling on him in Cambridge in November 1899, and in the following year dedicating to him a monograph on Greek Printing in the Fifteenth Century.

A scholarly man, Dunn's writings included translating part of the late 15th century edition of De beatitudine claustrali (On the benefits of the monastic life) by the Dominican monk Engelbertus Cultrifex (1430-92). The work is prefaced by a short passage purporting to be by the theologian Peter of Blois (c.1130-1211) who became Archdeacon of Bath in 1176. Dunn is also recorded as having undertaken a translation of the Premediarum peccatorum, attributed to Peter of Blois, for the Rev. J.A. Giles (1808-84), a scholar of Anglo-Saxon history who was a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Could it have been through Giles that Dunn obtained a place at the same College for his obviously brilliant pupil Proctor?

As a teacher Dunn seems to have been idolised by his charges judging by this Memorial Address given at Bath Abbey in 1932 by John Alfred Spender (1862-1942), journalist, author and uncle of the poet Stephen Spender. "He had none of the recognized marks of the trade - the starched dignity, the aloofness, the order-must-be-kept attitude which was thought proper in a headmaster in those days," wrote this former Bath College pupil. "Every hour spent in class with him was an adventure. No one knew, least of all he, where it might lead; he followed his thought with the flattering assumption that his boys could keep pace, though it took them from Greek grammar to the philosophy of Plato, and ended in a disquisition on the origin of species."

For Proctor, the future disciple of William Morris and yearner for a more egalitarian society, this teacher who treated his charges as equals must have made a deep impression. "He encouraged you to come out with your crudest thoughts, and suffered argument and even contradiction with a patience that bridged the gulf between boy and man, and made him the friend even more than the schoolmaster."

Above: Corpus Christi College, Oxford

As for the headmaster's recollections of his former pupil, Dunn remembered him clearly as "born for out-of-the-way scholarly pursuits" and recalled the unusually large library of books which Proctor took with him when in October 1886 he entered Corpus Christi College, where he had gained an open scholarship to study the classics course, also known as 'Greats.'

His bookish inclinations became even more evident at University. Soon after arriving at Oxford he printed his own translation of Captivi, a comedy by Plautus, which was that year acted in Latin at Bath College. A fellow-undergraduate at Corpus, the historian J.G. Milne, also remembered Proctor's library, recalling how he soon got a footing in the literary group of the period, joining College societies like the Pelican Essay Club and co-founding an even more select group known as the Owlets, composed in equal proportions of dons and undergraduates, which met to read English plays or selections from English literature on alternate weeks.

He was remembered during his time at Oxford as following every type of antiquarian pursuit, from brass rubbing to war-gaming, and, while not physically gifted as a sportsman followed College rowing with enthusiasm.

His mother had moved from Bath to Oxford, where she took rooms in Walton Street, and during University holidays Proctor spent much time on walking tours with her, including trips to Scotland, Belgium and Norway. But bibliography soon became his main chosen pursuit. In his second year he was elected Junior Librarian and set about producing a catalogue of the College Library. Before he left Oxford he had made for his College a complete list of its incunabula and also of its English books printed before the close of the sixteenth century.

It was following a suggestion by Edward Gordon Duff (1863-1924), notable for producing from 1893-99 the first catalogue of the John Rylands Library in Manchester that Proctor wrote his first paper on a bibliographical topic, choosing as his subject Jan van Doesborgh (c.1508-30), the printer remarkable for the numerous books in English which were issued from the various presses of Antwerp. The paper appeared in the 1892 issue of The Library and subsequently in the second of the illustrated monographs of the Bibliographical Society.

Above: The Radcliffe Camera, part of Oxford University's Bodleian Library

Duff had been engaged in cataloguing incunabula at the Bodleian Library, but had only got to the end of letter J when he left Oxford. He was succeeded by Proctor who on a paid basis between February 1891 and September 1893 catalogued over 3,000 incunabula at the Bodleian, as well exploring New College Library where he made the discovery of some fragments on vellum of a previously unknown Caxton.

During his time at the Bodleian Proctor lived with his mother at a house at 10, St Margaret's Road, in Oxford. But 1893 saw him move to London, where on 16 October he took up the post of assistant in the printed books department at the British Museum. For five years Proctor and his mother rented a house in Pelham Road, Wimbledon.

Above: The Reading Room at the British Museum

By 1898 he had at last, by the use of nearly all his leisure for more than four years, completed his great work An Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum: from the invention of printing to the year MD, with notes of those in the Bodleian Library. It was published in four parts in an edition of 350 copies.

It was the bibliographer Henry Bradshaw (1831-86) who had pioneered the method of cataloguing books according to the printers, the centres in which they worked, and the centres and countries into which printing was gradually introduced.

Proctor's genius was in using his extraordinary eye and memory for typefaces to apply this approach to the incunabula of the British Museum. By listing and describing every known type used by each printer, he showed how printing technology had developed throughout Europe. His efforts allowed the many books printed with no named place or printer in the period up to 1500 to be ranged with those books whose origin is explicitly stated. Thanks to his efforts the British Museum came to be seen as a world leader in bibliography since his help was sought, almost daily, by students in every part of Europe and also in the United States.

Indeed the Bradshaw-Proctor approach was soon applied to collections anywhere in the world. It lay behind the 1908 publication by the British Museum of its official Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the British Museum which listed more than 10,400 separate editions.
In 1898 Proctor and his mother moved to Oxshott, Surrey, where they had built themselves a house. By subsequent purchases nearly two acres of land were added to this. Proctor seems to have enjoyed the life of physical exertion which the cultivation of his domain involved, including growing large numbers of fruit trees. The garden features prominently in his diaries. Sometimes he would walk to work at the British Museum through the Surrey countryside, arriving as late as 11.00 am but putting in a full day's labour.

His diaries, started in 1899, are in the British Library. There were originally four volumes but volume 3 has been lost. The diaries discuss his work as a bibliographer but also give an insight into his home life with his mother. They reveal him through his views on current affairs to be something of a radical.

Above: William Morris in 1890

While at Oxford Proctor had become acquainted with the writings of William Morris (1834-96) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), and he soon came to take an interest in their political and economic ideas. He first met Morris in 1894, becoming a fanatical admirer and collecting books and ephemera from the Kelmscott Press, the private press that Morris had established at Hammersmith in 1891 with the aim of proving that the high standards of book production the past could be repeated - even surpassed - in the present. Medieval in design, the books produced by the Kelmscott Press were modelled on the incunabula of the 15th century. It was this admiration for Morris that in 1900 led Proctor to publish The printing of Greek in the fifteenth century.

This was followed by the experiments in Greek printing. In 1903 Proctor was involved in the development of a new type face for printing Greek, based on that used by the Spanish printer Arnaldo Guilen de Brocar in 1514 at Alcalá, near Madrid. The new font was known as Otter, based on Proctor's own family crest, and resulted in the fine edition of Aeschylus' Oresteia printed at the Chiswick Press in 1904.

Shown above is William Morris' design 'Brother Rabbit.' This particular design is used to decorate the cover of Dr John Bowman's edition of Proctor's diaries

An enthusiast for using Morris fabrics in his own home, Proctor was also inspired to support his aesthetic ideas. His name appears in an 1897 list of members of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, a group founded by Morris twenty years earlier in 1877. Known in Proctor's time as 'Anti-Scrape' the group had been founded to oppose the practice adopted by many Victorian architects of scraping off the old plaster of medieval buildings. The group was joined in 1889 by the architect Ernest Gimson (1864-1919), another admirer of William Morris who has an interesting connection with Budleigh. For it was Gimson who designed the house known as Coxen, off Dalditch Lane in Knowle, pictured below and mentioned elsewhere in these pages at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.com/2009/06/over-pebbles-and-far-away-knowle-east.html

Gimson had attended a lecture on 'Art and Socialism' at the Leicester Secular Society given by Morris. In 1893 he moved to the rural region of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire “to live near to nature.” The use of Devon cob, an eco-friendly material, in Coxen’s construction is characteristic of his work.

It is curious to note that by a strange quirk of fate, the house in which Proctor was born would eventually be transformed by the same Arts and Crafts movement into the brick and tiled Lawn Terrace that we see today. But that aping of medieval architecture would not take place until 1935.
It was also in the early 1900s that Proctor began studying in the original the Icelandic Sagas, many of which Morris had helped to translate. This new interest resulted shortly before his death in the publication through the Chiswick Press in 1903 of a version of Laxdæla saga, translated as The Story of the Laxdalers.

The socialist ideas expounded by Morris found a willing disciple in Proctor. According to his friend the historian J.G. Milne already quoted by Alfred Pollard in the collection of Bibliographical Essays printed for the Proctor Memorial Fund in 1905, he "was constantly thinking out schemes for the improvement of life and its conditions; he was always ready to hear and inquire about the circumstances of the 'East-Enders' amongst whom I work, and to suggest solutions for the problems arising there. The enthusiasm of humanity was the real ruling force of his character."

No doubt he continued to discuss these radical ideas with Emery Walker (1851-1933) and Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), friends who had worked with Morris in the book publishing business and who visited Proctor frequently at Oxshott. In 1901 he was honoured by the request to become one of the trustees of the Morris estate.

Above: Queen Victoria, a symbol of much that Proctor disliked about the society of his time

Throughout his diaries he is fiercely opposed to the Boer war, celebrating Boer rather than British victories. A fervent anti-monarchist he rejoices at the death of any member of a royal family. On 19 January 1901, a few days before the death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd, he notes "The old Washerwoman of Windsor reported to be kicking the bucket - à la bonne heure!"

Proctor's diaries refer constantly to the long walking tours, generally with his mother which he had enjoyed since his student days. Though in her seventies she continued to accompany him.

This water colour painting by Arthur Wyatt Edgell shows Budleigh Salterton's Steamer Steps and the coast path from Exmouth in 1868, the year of Proctor's birth

In October 1902 the pair took the train to Exmouth and then took to the coast path to Budleigh. "A warm hazy calm morning, the sea like glass," he notes. "It was a very pleasant walk along the cliffs. At Straight Point I turned aside & had a dip off the rocks; the water was as warm as in summer. Then we went on by the Beacon to B-S, came in down along the cliff to the Parade, & then up the street to 'Station Road' once Moor Lane.

Revisiting his childhood haunts he commented: "Less change than we expected, but a smartening up generally, & a disappearance of many old names. The house in Lawn Villas is now a milliner's shop." Various old acquaintances and neighbours remembered them: Mrs Webber, of Prospect House off Chapel Hill; the Mercers, of Lydney House, East Terrace, who gave them tea; and the Bakers, of The Lawn, whom he describes as "dull."

After a twilight walk to Sherbrooke Hill the pair returned to the Rolle Arms, the hotel in the centre of Budleigh where they had taken rooms, now sadly demolished. "There being no Sunday trains I had to carry the bag all day," notes Proctor. He mentions their "most delightful walk" to Sidmouth via the Otter bridge and Ladram. Understandably, after a further tramp as far as Branscombe, and then on to Beer, he described his mother as "completely done."

In the early summer of 1903 the two went together to Corsica and Florence. For the later walking tour in the Austrian Alps, Proctor started by himself on the evening of 29 August. His whole trip was planned to last only just three weeks, and he was due back at the British Museum on 22 September. His mother, concerned that she had not heard from him, prompted a search of the region by the Austrian police, but no body was ever recovered and it was presumed that he had died in the mountains after losing his footing.

He was 35 years old, but it was said of him that in that short time he had achieved a lifetime's work.

"He was perhaps one of those lucky people for whom his work was his life," writes his editor John Bowman. And yet the question of how long Proctor could have maintained such a work rate inevitably arises. Alfred Pollard had doubts, as he writes in the memorial volume. "His eager, untiring energies could not long have survived the rate at which they were burning away, and he himself had calmly faced the certainty that he could only hope for a few more years of effective eyesight."

Sources:
Bath Central Library Cataloguehttp://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/onlinelists/GB0256%20MSS.pdf
Bowman, J.H. (ed.) - A Critical Edition of the Private Diaries of Robert Proctor The Life of a Librarian at the British Museum
The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston Queenston Lampeter 2010 Morris and Co.'s Commercial Directory and Gazetteer. 1870
Spender, John Alfred - Men and Things, 1937 (Cassell and Company)
Pollard, Alfred W. (ed.) - Proctor, Robert: Bibliographical Essays For the Donors and Subscribers to the Proctor Memorial Fund. MDCCCV Printed at the Chiswick Press, London, 1905

Monday, 14 November 2011

There's always something going on in Budleigh Salterton in
spite of what some meanies say. 'Sponge throwing'? Why not? We'd heard it was a
charity event involving local dignitaries, and there was even a rumour that one
of them would be getting a soaking, standing in the stocks and wearing his regalia.

It was all happening in a local resident's garden with an
exhibition set up in a marquee, and bizarrely the day's theme was sponges.
Anyway off we went and sure enough there was the dignitary looking pretty wet
and bedraggled but smiling away, calling out between sponges "It's all in
a good cause! Come on, sponge my face!"Very sporting of him we thought.

The good cause was the Marine Conservation Society, and the
sponge theme was all to do with the bicentenary of the man who used to live in
this charming little cottage on Fore Street Hill. It's called Umbrella Cottage,
apparently because the porch, now thatched, was originally in the shape of an
umbrella.

Henry John Carter was his name as you can see from the blue
plaque on the cottage wall, and he turned out to be Budleigh's only home-grown
Fellow of the Royal Society, having been born in the town on this very day, 18
August, two hundred years ago and coming back to settle down here when he
retired.

Being an FRS is something quite special and exclusive -
reserved for top scientists - I've been told. Well, the Royal Society has a
pretty smart address at No 7, Carlton House Terrace in London, with a history going back to 1660.

In fact Henry Carter had gained the letters FRS after his
name for the work that he'd done in geology during his time as a doctor with
the Army in India.
In total he'd written 238 papers on
diverse subjects - medicine, geology, ethnology, micropaleontology, zoology and
botany. But it was for his research into sponges that he's mostly remembered,
and that came about after his fellow-FRS friend John Edward Gray, Keeper at the
Natural History section of the British Museum had asked him to undertake a
little classification project shortly after he retired in 1862 to live in
Budleigh.

Henry ended up
writing 1,894 pages in 127 publications on sponges, so certainly deserves his
description as a spongiologist as well as his FRS, which he gained on 9 June
1859. The Royal Society awarded him its Royal Medal in 1872 for what they described as "...his long
continued and valuable researches in zoology, and more especially for his
inquiries into the natural history of the Spongiadae."

Living on the coast in retirement allowed him to carry on
spongiologising even on Budleigh beach: in an article published in 1874 he
noted a variety of Esperia aegagropila "growing in small
patches scantily on the rocks (at Budleigh-Salterton) towards low-water
mark."

Now I'd always
thought that sponges are rather uninteresting things, just sitting there on the
sea bed like seaweed or any other type of marine plant but not doing very much
apart from swallowing and regurgitating sea water. But it turns out that
they're animals, and there are between 5,000 and 10,000 different species.
There are even 150 freshwater species. They also have a quite special sex life,
being hermaphrodites, and they come in different shapes and sizes with the
tallest reaching two metres in height.

And they're by no means totally useless.This species Rhabdastrella globostellata,
also known as yellow pot sponge, is a marine sponge of the order Astrophorida.
It is native to many regions of the Indian Ocean including the shores of Madagascar, the Seychelles,
and Australia as well as the
MalayanPeninsula
and Singapore.
It was first described by Henry Carter as Stelleta globostellata in 1883, named
after its shape - from the Latin globus meaning 'sphere' and stellātus meaning 'star-shaped.'

It may look like
something the dog sicked up, but it's has been shown to produce a wide variety
of isomalabaricanes, a type of triterpene molecules with notable cytotoxic
activity towards certain cancer cell lines.

Sorry, I'm just
showing off.I haven't a clue what all
those words mean, but they looked pretty impressive in the marquee display.

But it's true
that that sponges collected from rock pools by a team from the Welsh
School of Pharmacy in south Wales
a few years ago were shown to be a source of new drugs to combat breast and
lung cancer.

We
discovered all this when we went into the marquee and saw what they'd done to
remember Henry Carter. There are
even sponges named after him, like this beautiful stylissa carteri orange sponge from Randayan Island, Indonesia.
A lot of the above fascinating information had been provided by a Dutch
academicwho'd written about Carter and
his work. The exhibition organisers had also had a lot of help from a British
professor who is a Royal Society Research Fellow.
Although he's currently abroad he'd given lots of advice about how to plan the
exhibition and had apparently suggested that the sponge theme be just one in
the general topic of marine conservation.

That was when the event organisers had approached Peter MacDonald, Head of Sustainability at the National
Fish Board.As he's the son of a much
respected Budleigh resident it seemed
quite appropriate and apparently he gave them some useful advice.They'd also had help from a big marine
laboratory based in Devon and from a rather
well-known oyster farm whose owner feels strongly about marine conservation
issues.

There were a lot of interesting exhibits to do with the
history of fishing in Budleigh and LymeBay provided by another local
resident who'd spent his life in the fishing industry and often gives talks on
the subject. And there was plenty of stuff about the JurassicCoast.
I loved the amazing photos of the starfish invasion on Budleigh beach a few
years ago.

There was an
interesting timeline chart showing Henry Carter's achievements throughout his
life. Two years after retiring to Budleigh he married Anne Doyle from Sligo, Ireland.
She was about 21 years younger than him and they had a daughter Annie in 1866. On
4 October 1888 he had a paralytic attack which left him with impaired powers of
speech and vision. There was some improvement with time but he never completely
recovered and died on 4 May 1895 in his 82nd year. He's buried in the
churchyard at All Saints, East Budleigh.

But it wasn't just posters and pictures inside the marquee.
One wall of the main exhibition was taken up by a gigantic aquarium-full of
sponges and other odd-looking marine creatures. A
local museum's Natural History section had also helped out by providing marine
specimens.

Local art club members had collaborated with the organisers
by staging a display of marine art. The pictures had been selected by a local marine
biologist who's also had some success as an artist. We loved the saucy Joyce
Dennys pictures of mermaids which were apparently done for a mural in the
bathroom of Lion House on Fore Street Hill. A Budleigh art gallery had agreed
to stage an exhibition of prints on a maritime theme and some of those were on
display. A local primary school had organised an art competition to see which
pupils could paint the most amazing sea monsters, and they'd produced some very
imaginative work.

Outside on the lawn a celebrity cook whose name I can't
remember was preparing tempting dishes using some very odd-looking fish that
you don't normally see in fishmongers. There was a display of his books and I
bought one of them which he was kind enough to sign with an inscription to the
'Budleigh Blogger.' I think he was quite intrigued when I told him about my
blog and how it had started, but on reflection he may have just been being
polite. I do tend to rabbit on a bit about my personal obsessions. He seemed
like quite a well-educated and civilised sort of chap so I don't think he'd
have told me to clear off and make way for the next person in the queue.

As it was tea-time we stayed on to watch the sponge cake
competition. Not a judging of the best sponge cake but a contest to guess the
weight of the biggest sponge-cake I've ever seen. This was a great
crowd-puller, almost more popular than the sponge-throwing and people were
buying tickets at £1 a go. The top prize for the nearest guess to the correct
weight was a day with the celebrity cook working with him in his famous West
Country restaurant. I bought a fiver's worth, guessing that the cake was about
30 kilos. I was also hoping that I might get the chance to really explain about
the blog and how absolutely everyone should read it.

Clearly I'd under-estimated because the day ended with a
speech from the nice celebrity cook asking us to eat more fish with strange
names and giving the news that the gigantic sponge-cake had weighed in at 54
kilos.

The event could have ended with a sponge-cake fight, which
my grandchildren would have enjoyed. And the newspaper and TV people who were
there would have loved it. But it would
have been rather wasteful and messy. And of course the seagulls, like this hungry-looking one in the photo, would have
joined in, making things even messier. No, much more sensible was what they did
with the cake, which was to cut it up and send it to local care homes.

The organisers had managed to get the day sponsored by a
rather well-known supermarket chain which had opened a branch in the area. With
its help and with a lot of hard work on the part of everyone involved a large
cheque was sent off to the Marine Conservation Society. I hope it's been used
to save a few more whales and coral reefs.

If Henry Carter's spirit is up there swimming around in a
heavenly waterworld being sponged gently by Joyce Dennys-type mermaids I'm sure
he'd have been tickled and touched by the way that Budleigh Salterton had
remembered his life and achievements.

I'm sure also that he'd have approved this gesture on the
part of a small coastal town to acknowledge the debt that it's owed to the sea
for its livelihood over so many centuries.

About Me

Born in 1946, in Birmingham UK, of Scottish-Irish parentage, and brought up as a Roman Catholic. Early education may have driven me into teaching, in the belief that schools should offer a more enjoyable experience for children. Studied French at London University, specialising in 16th century literature. Then came 34 years of teaching French, along with red herrings and common sense, at Oundle School, Northamptonshire. Published articles in Etudes Rabelaisiennes, (a long time ago), and a couple of books - one big 'Oundle's War' (1995) - and one small 'The Scientist in The Cottage' (2013) - a biography of Henry Carter FRS (1813-95). Dabbles, and some people say meddles, in many areas. A passionate gardener, moved to Devon partly to grow ericaceous plants more easily. Other interests include family, cycling, walking, photography, reading, music, studying butterflies, chopping wood, DIY, playing on the scaffold tower, and networking for the Greater Good. Married to Anthea for over 40 years. Three children: Emily, Simeon and Rosanna, three granddaughters and two Bengal cats. Like an increasing number of my friends of my generation, I'm a cancer survivor – I hope!